Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

"Somehow"?

They've given a specific list of reasons. If you're going to complain about it, at least refute their specific technical reasons if you want your complaint to have any credibility.



They've given a specific list of reasons.

Reasons that mean nothing to those of us that don't understand display servers and/or composting.

If you're going to complain about it, at least refute their specific technical reasons if you want your complaint to have any credibility.

I can't, and I don't think any of us meaningfully can unless there are some X, Wayland or Mir developers lurking around HN.

But I think the Wayland dev's google plus post [3] mailing list post [2] and IRC log [1] all give the impression that that list of reasons offered up by Ubuntu is, at least in part, bunk or could be addressed upstream in wayland. An upstream project that Ubuntu was already involved in for years and had the power to shape but never actually voiced their concerns when wayland's architecture didn't meet ubuntu's requirements. Ubuntu is free not to reveal the real reasons behind their decision, but unless they do the whole thing is dripping in Not Invented Here syndrome.

In fact, it seems like from the Wayland community, the problem isn't that Ubuntu is striking it out on their own, its that they're distributing a bunch of miss-understanding about Wayland in the process.

    01:16 <RAOF [Ubuntu dev]> We're not forking wayland; that's part of what krh [Wayland lead] is annoyed with?
    01:17 <Prf_Jakob> RAOF: he said he was annoyed with you having a wiki page full of missunderstandings of how wayland work.
[1] http://pastebin.com/KjRm3be1

[2] http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2013-Mar...

[3] https://plus.google.com/100409717163242445476/posts


specific? They are pretty damn vague, not to mention completely wrong. See e.g. the comments from X.org/Wayland developers at:

https://plus.google.com/100409717163242445476/posts/jDq6BAgd...


Yes, they got one thing wrong though it's already been corrected in Canonical's design document.

But it seems to me that the main problem Canonical had with Wayland was that they wanted to run their stack on devices that only had Android device drivers. As far as I can tell Wayland relies on things like KMS to function, and at the very least Firefox OS has no plans to use Wayland because they don't think they can get it to use the Android drivers they're planning on using.


> As far as I can tell Wayland relies on things like KMS to function

Is this a limitation of Wayland or the reference implementation? If I'm not mistaken the server needs a modesetting api, not necessarily KMS.

The server runs on top of a modesetting API (kernel modesetting, OpenWF Display or similar)

http://wayland.freedesktop.org/architecture.html


That seems like a very good and practical reason to me. As far as I could tell, Wayland is very much tied to KMS, and not interested in doing otherwise.


Wayland already had a proof-of-concept Android backend that worked with Android drivers.


So much the worse for using Android. It's past time that we have proper Linux on phones without interposing all the Google-Java stuff.


I believe this was referring to the Android kernel patches, not the Java-based userland.


Java, or rather Dalvik, has absolutely nothing to do with the kernel or graphics stack in Android.




Consider applying for YC's Winter 2026 batch! Applications are open till Nov 10

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: